Digital Marketing Blog

There are two ways to improve the revenue your website provides: (1) Increase the traffic, i.e., potential buyers, and (2) improve the conversion rate of the site. There are a myriad of ways to go about those things, but at the core it’s as simple as that.

Customer Acquisition and Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).

This is the essence of what we do for our clients.

In order to do these things well, we need a correctly implemented, fully verified data measurement system. For most businesses this system is Google Analytics (GA), which is a fine tool and the one we interact with most. However, many businesses frequently go wrong by putting the GA code on their site and then forgetting about it, or not going the distance to set it up properly. This results in data that isn’t correct or verified, and that means our efforts at improving site performance will be ill-informed. Bummer.

If you have GA on your site, there’s a 99.9% likelihood you need to review and fix it. I say this after examining the analytics tool implementations of dozens of businesses as we perform CompThreat audits. A typical GA set-up will not give you the data you need to improve. And I’m willing to bet that’s exactly what you’ve got.

For example, how many people are using your site search engine to find what they need? What are the terms they’re using to search? How many days on average until users submit a lead? What is the conversion rate of your site? Is that up or down from last month or last year? Are you unknowingly tracking internal company traffic (muddying up your data)? Is your bounce rate being calculated correctly? If so, what do the numbers tell you? How many phone calls are coming from the website? Which marketing channels are performing the best for your site…and which are money down the drain?

Without even doing a CompThreat for you, I already know that one of our recommendations will likely be to review and augment your GA implementation. That means different things for different businesses, but I have yet to work with a client who had the analytics portion of their site locked down. And since we’ve found this by doing CompThreats where we look at 4+ sites at a time, we know that your competition hasn’t tapped into their analytics potential either.

Why Is That Important?

If you and your competitors aren’t tracking what you should be, then you’re each crippling your long-term ability to improve. It’s a red flag that you may not be operating with the long game in mind. If you’re concentrating solely on improving your lead count today, you’re likely stunting your growth tomorrow.

If you want to get the edge on your competitors, having a well-implemented analytics system that feeds you business-changing information is one of the best ways to do it.

How do you stack up against your competitors? Data tracking and analysis is only one component of the bigger picture, and if you need help stepping back to look at that picture, we’d love to help. We use competitive analysis and strategic planning to grow your customer base and increase your conversion rates. Give us a call at 615-669-9728 to chat about how your business can win big.